I really enjoyed all the old Sinbad movies. At once stage we had quite a collection all on video unfortunately. We tried transitioning them to DVD but that didn’t really work probably because the kids would jump about near the computer and shake up the DVD player.

Skyfall Meets the Time Vortex – Bond and Who: The Fiftieth Anniversaries

SPOILERS FOR SKYFALL

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Isn’t it interesting that two of Britain’s biggest fictional character exports, James Bond and The Doctor, both reach their 50th anniversaries this year?

As characters, they could not be more different. Or could they? Both are styled iconoclastic rule-breakers with their own fierce codes of morality; head and shoulders above most of their fellow agents/ Time Lords because of their creative individualism. That’s how the British like to see themselves; eccentric, honourable, brilliant rule-breakers with a strong sense of duty. National myths are often most visible in national fiction.

Skyfall is better than Quantum of Solace by an incalculable mile, but then Quantum was a truly turgid and lacklustre affair. Skyfall has been nominated for all the awards and it’s done extremely well at the box office too. I think the uneven but enduring franchise has finally realised that what carries a movie cannot be incredible stunts and stunning sultry women alone (although we expect them in Bond) but a half-decent script, a great director and some wholly decent actors.

Daniel Craig plays an older and more vulnerable Bond and it suits him. Judi Dench is allowed by this script to be a more complex character, ruthless, fond and mistaken. She does it beautifully. I can never resist Ralph Fiennes in anything. He brings his oft-played icy yet fragile majesty to this film. And Naomie Harris, as MoneyPenny, turns in the most actually seductive seduction scene with 007 I think I’ve ever seen. A flirtatious but tender exchange by Shanghai city lights which leaves more than it reveals to the imagination. I really like Ms. Harris.

The script trailed off in its latter half, unfortunately, although shots of the desolate loveliness of Scotland were almost worth it.

My major gripe was the character of Javier Bardem; not Bardem himself I hasten to add, who is an accomplished actor with a pantherian quality. No, I was deeply disappointed that the old trope of an effete and mentally unstable Bond villain (because “homosexuality is creepy, folks!”) could still, so lazily, be written in 2012. However, Bond’s response was a sign of changing times, because, far from being homophobic, it hinted at a bisexual past for 007.

Here, we can tie Bond and Who in their fiftieth years together again, because, in the half century since their inception, one of the most significant changes in British society has been the changing acceptance of homosexuality/ bisexuality; from Joe Orton’s adventures in cottaging at the cusp of decriminalisation, to a Conservative PM (however opportunistically) proposing to legislate for same-sex marriage.

These national narratives of ours, Ian Fleming’s James Bond, and Sydney Newman, Verity Lambert and others’ Doctor Who, reflect those changes. A bisexual Bond (however hinted at, off-camera and one-upon-a-time) and a Doctor with a lesbian lizard woman from the dawn of time and her Victorian maid wife as (occasional) TARDIS companions? Our most well-known fictional icons of Britishness have, along with the rest of British society, stepped some way out of the closet in time for the new century.

I have to say that Doctor Who has been doing it better, for longer, with thanks to Russell T. Davis, Moffat and the reboot. But then, when it comes to The Doctor vs Bond, the former has always been an infinitely preferable iteration of British fantasy masculinity; patrician and arrogant maybe, but endearingly shambolic, fiercely bright, and more concerned with a shared chat, a great day out and a cup of tea and biscuits than a license to kill. Some might say, given our colonial past, that both are highly idealised versions of British interactions with other nations! And so they are, but that I think, is a subject for another day.

@craig and @phaseshift – if you thing this would be better as a blog post because it’s too long as a general post, by all means convert it…

Not me. Sorry, Craig, I know you offered and I didn’t reply, but I’ve just sorted out a problem with local time not displaying properly, files not loading properly and then I need to look at our chat and wiki facilities – I really don’t want to take on mod responsibilities for another site. 😀

Hiya – What type of thread were you thinking about? I think it was generally agreed to keep things to general threads until a topic that came up got a fair few responses and was spun off into a more specific thread.

If your up for it, do you want to write a blog introducing the uninitiated to the undoubted delights of Ms. Mars? Why it’s good? Favourite episodes? A smattering of YouTube clips? I have something I hope to complete for the weekend but if you fancy a bit of advocacy on what I’ve missed, I’d enjoy reading it.

Unfortunately “The Power of Mod” doesn’t enable me to do anything about the minor incursion of Spam overnight. I must perform a spell to raise the mighty and powerful KeyMaster @craig (Praise Him).

Happy to do a post, but it was more puzzlement – the Veronica Mars tit bit (apparently the fastest Kickstarter to $1,000,000 and $2,000,000 ever, btw) wasn’t really a review/ recommendation but an unusual item of interest to genre fans (think Nancy Drew, as imagined by Raymond Chandler (Line from opening narration: “Want to know how I lost my virginity? So do it…” – as dark as prime time US TV allows, essentially) )- but if it’s not new thread-worthy, that’s fine.

I had vaguely heard about it, then a totallylegimatedownload popped up. I grabbed, started watching with a view to seeing 2 or 3 eps. 10 eps later it was 3am….

I suspect it is not available on Region 2 DVDs, but might be wrong. If anyone finds it, grab it. You won’t be disappointed. Pretty well every writer you like – Whedon, Goddard, Espenson from over there, RTD and Moff both, have name-checked it.

Personally I’d welcome a few recommendations and longer posts on shows to watch. I think my point was more that if you’d like to write something we could use that as the start of a blog, giving other people something to bounce off if you will. I know @juniperfish is busy at the moment but I’d love to see if she could write something to tempt me to watch “The Vampire Diaries”. 🙂

I realised today that I’d never posted my favourite movies here. I have a lot. It would be a very long list. When I was at Edinburgh University I helped run the film society, which was the biggest in the UK. We had 3 double bills a week – I saw far too many movies. At The Pleasance (which you may have heard of due to The Edinburgh Festival) I used to do the projection some of the time as it was 16mm – 35mm projection is a lot more complex. Many fun memories of being in the booth.

Anyway, I love a load of old movies, but several of Fritz Lang’s blew me away when I was young. Probably my fave is The Big Heat, which I just looked up on Rotten Tomatoes and it gets 100%, so worth checking out. There’s all the usual 70s and 80s suspects such as Coppola and Scorsese, the Coen brothers I love too. But I think this may be my favourite. Because it’s a true story, that happened to real people, of brave people doing brave things, and it is extremely well told. It only gets 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, but you can’t always please everyone.

I do have issues with it, the female characters are not as well defined as they could be and there are hints of misogyny – but it is a film about men being men so it would be hard to avoid.

So despite some moments making me cringe, I still love it overall. I love Doctor Who flying about space and time, but the true story of the breaking of the sound barrier, and then of the first American astronauts and our own baby steps into space, makes fantastic viewing.

This trailer doesn’t do it any justice, but it is a brilliant film and I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it.

And while we’re on films about our baby steps into space, may I recommend The Dish? It’s kind of a ‘based vaguely on real events’ film rather than a drama-doc, but it’s very, very funny. And Parkes Observatory does look like it’s set in the middle of a sheep-run; the logic was that by placing it in Parkes, middle of nowhere NSW (pop. slightly less than 10,000) they’d avoid a great deal of radio interference.

Parkes Observatory, by the way, is still working with NASA and also has an extremely impressive record of discovering pulsars.

@bluesqueakpip I love The Dish too, fantastic film and great fun. Apollo 13 is also very good but nowhere near my top 10… and as for being better than The Right Stuff, maybe I’ll have to check it out again to get a fuller appreciation. But considering The Big Heat, The Godfather and Millers Crossing don’t beat The Right Stuff in my final list (although close), maybe it’s just a me thing, maybe something in that movie just flicks all the right switches – a bit funny, a bit geeky, a bit heroic, a bit macho, a bit macho-is-actually-pathetic etc. etc.

Thinking about @craig and @curvedspace‘s discussion on the kitsch aspects of Flash Gordon set me wondering. Is there a movie that you like / love that you really shouldn’t. You know, it’s poorly written or acted, dodgy production values but, but you just can’t help it. A guilty pleasure if you will.

I’ll start. Two words. Hudson Hawk.

Bruce Willis as a singing cat burglar, Danny Aiello as his assistant, Andi Macdowell as a nun, James Coburn as head of the CIA, Richard E Grant and Sandra Bernhard as villains, characters called Kit Kat and Snickers and a mythical Leonardo da Vinci alchemy machine. What’s not to love? Plenty, it turns out. What can I say? I’m bearing my soul here people.

Flash Gordon tops my list; I’ve loved that movie since I was about seven.

Hackers. Even people who haven’t worked in tech (I’ve done QA/IT) know that the technology is ridiculous. Plus the villain is cheezy and I’ve never met hackers like those kids. But the music is good, and the movie makes me laugh. (Sneakers, OTOH, is a hacker movie that holds up.)

I will also admit to indulging in the occasional Xanadu cheesefest. Good music and good costumes again (I’m detecting a theme). And this one I can watch with my toddler, which makes a nice break from the replays of Sesame Street and the Miyazaki movies suitable for kids.

@whohar – I’m not sure this meets your criteria, as it’s fairly well-written, the acting is hammy in some cases but not too OTT, and the production values are pretty good. But, it is indeed a movie I don’t care to admit to my RL friends that I like – A Knight’s Tale.

Every time I watch it, I think ‘this just shouldn’t work!’ It’s so gloriously loopy in its medieval setting but with jousting crowds chanting ‘We will … we will … rock you’ and genteel ball-goers grooving to ‘Golden Years’. The accents are all over the place – especially Heath Ledger’s – and that’s probably the only place it falls down.

It’s a mash-up of so many different movies that in less restrained hands it could have turned into something like Scary Movie. But it’s consistently laugh-out-loud funny even after repeat viewings; and Paul Bettany as ‘Geoff’ Chaucer is a joy to watch.

@curvedspace – Sneakers is one of my all-time favourite movies. I love how they take the mickey out of themselves the whole way through – Robert Redford and Sydney Poitier saying ‘we’re getting too old for this’, River Phoenix wanting the girl, Dan Aykroyd making fun of conspiracy theorists and his weight, and (Sir) Ben Kingsley doing the worst Brooklyn accent ever. (actually, Sir Ben probably wasn’t doing a self-parody. I don’t think he has a sense of humour. 🙂 )

I’d mentioned Stephen Sondheim musicals in another thread. Speaking of Sondheim’s Into The Woods, Disney’s signed Johnny Depp (Big Bad Wolf), Meryl Streep (Witch), Chris Pine, Tammy Blanchard and more … to be directed by Rob Marshall (who did one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies)

@tardisblue – I used to think Johnny Depp was such an interesting actor making interesting choices, never the same character in films which were wildly different in tone and subject (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, Edward Scissorhands, etc).

Now, I see his name attached to a movie and sigh in quiet desperation and assume the project will be shite.

However, the cast for In The Woods as per your link contains some names that appear to be must-see – not just Streep but also Christine Baranski (Cinderella’s wicked stepmother). Less of a must-see but still interesting casting are James Corden and Emily Blunt. So, maybe this one will be good … although that having been said, Depp is playing the Big Bad Wolf so my trepidation starts over-riding my excitement …

Tonight (well, tomorrow really) at 01:10, Film4 are showing ‘Haxan:Witchcraft Through The Ages’ as part of it’s ‘Dark Arts’ season. Made in 1922, if this is a typical example of horror/supernatural films from that period (especially European ones) it should be pretty creepy 😈

Now, as is the way with “top” lists, you and I probably have about a hundred films in our “top ten”. My brother (genius and all round good guy) had a really interesting alternative to a “top” list of songs – he asked “what three songs would I like to hear right now?”

so – what three movies would you like (the choice to see unless you like marathons) right now?
What’s great is that I’d bet it’d include film(s) that aren’t on that list!

Now, there’s a Desert Island alternative list question! Of course, ‘right now’ will differ from moment to moment, eh? (sore-ry, went all Canadian on you there 🙂 ).

If I feel in need of gentle comedy, pathos, and big themes, I’d go for ‘The Dish’, or ‘Dave’. If my current mood is bordering on dangerous with a need for a hearty helping of cynicism, I’d go for ‘Dogma’. And if I just want to laugh at the outrageousness of existence, I’d put in ‘Blades of Glory.’

As much as I love big blockbusters like the Hobbit and I was very entertained by Pacific Rim, I’m a big supporter of independent British Films. There is so much more than just football and east end gangster films out there that seem to get a lot of the mainstream attention. Myself and my friend Paul have started a little youtube review show called ‘Best of British’ trying to dig up films that most people may have missed. The first film we watched was ‘The Hide’, a contained thriller with just two characters which ended up being the best film ive watched all year!

I finally caught 12 Years a Slave the other afternoon – powerful, incredibly so. Saw The Wolf of Wall Street yesterday and was disappointed in it – after hour 2 you’ve seen every depraved act of excess you need to and the rest becomes overkill. Great performance by DiCaprio, but Scorsese and writer Terence Winter have nothing to say of worth about greed/excess and the criminality of Wall Street.

I’d like to use the might hive brain of the forum. I have vague memories of a film (or possibly TV episode) that gave me the willies when I was a kid, featuring David McCallum being menaced by a creeping disemembered hand. Was it the version of Frankenstein that he appeared in? Thanks in advance if anyone can remember it…

@thekrynoidman — yeah, I saw that, cheers. I’ve actually seen that version of Frankenstein years ago but I can’t remember the creeping hand scene from it. Maybe it was. It certainly had some haunting moments in it anyway. Gah, it’s really bugging me now.

couldn’t have you really bugged about David McCallum now … 1960’s international heartthrob (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and the best bow tie wearing and opera loving forensic examiner currently on screen in the states (NCIS).

So I took quick look-sees at reviews of some likely-looking listings on his long list of credits. No slam dunks, but basketball is probably not his best sport, methinks. Too American. Too fast moving. Too, dare I say it?, tall. Still, I hope I’ve narrowed down the field for you. Some TV show summaries left the possibility of disembodied hands open to speculation.

I haven’t seen these, but here are some possibilities culled from McCallum’s extensive credits.

The Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense. McCallum works at an auction house which acquires a mysterious necklace … mysterious things start to happen … did I mention that this mysterious episode is full of mystery? Plus a little romance, apparently. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087087

And, if you want to thank me for all this extra credit sleuthing, well, you could always place McCallum’s late 1970’s – early 1980’s series Sapphire and Steel at the top of our Who-adjacent filling in the long months before October 2014 viewing queue. Non-human interdimensional operatives, policing the order of timee itself. Definitely worth a retrospective, IMHO. Especially since, as far as I know, iti was never shown in the states and I’ve always had a fan-girl crush on McCallum’s Illya Kuryakin (The Man from U.N.C.L.E..) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire_%26_Steel

@tardisblue — thanks for the detective work. Yeah, most of the ones you mentioned above did cross my mind. I’m thinking that the Frankenstein one is probably the most likely candidate so will probably have to try and source a copy if such a thing is possible.

RE. Sapphire and Steel, I refer you to our esteemed colleague @phaseshift‘s blog on the programme quite some months ago (and I suspect before you joined us)

TY, your fishiness. I definitely will check out @phaseshift‘s blog when I have a mo or ten. Want the time to give it justice. Have a friend coming over for dinner in less than an hour and no Tardis to cook the turkey in! Gotta get crackin’

By the bye, has there been anything substantive posted on here about Quartermass? I’ve seen it mentioned referentially often, but I missed out on it due to relative youth, parents not having met yet, country of birth, and a bunch of other tired excuses.

Well, I hope you enjoy the bit on Sapphire and Steel. @miapatrick asked for it to be included on the rewatch list as well.

Just on Quatermass, I’d love to include something, but I’ve been grappling with how to do it. You can’t really overestimate it’s resonance and impact (not just in the UK – both Stephen King and John Carpenter among others cite Quatermass and the Pit as big influences), but it’s a question of go with the original TV series (and Quatermass and the Pit is the only one that survives in it’s entirety), the films (which I’ll mention as this is the film thread 😉 ) or cheat and cover the “live” attempt at restaging The Quatermass Experiment of the mid 2000s (which is notable for including David Tennant and Mark Gatiss).

Quatermass and the Pit, the TV series is 6 x 35 minute episodes, so it depends on how people feel about reviewing 1950s TV for that duration. Personally, I think it’s fantastic for its time.

Sorry, forgot to mention @jimthefish, I’ve been struggling to remember anything that would fit the bill on McCallum being menaced by a hand, but I’m coming up blank. I’ve seem the version of Frankenstein before, but I don’t remember a scene like that (although that could be time playing tricks).

If you find out, let me know. If McCallum can sell being menaced by a floating pillow in S&S, he can pretty much sell being menaced by anything! 🙂

@craig — I’m increasingly convinced it is Frankenstein that I’m misremembering from all those years ago. I do remember seeing that film when I was quite small and it giving me the wiggins for years after. And it’s slowly but surely inspiring something now, no doubt after festering away inside me for all those years…